Monsters

Each layer went on easier than the last, cloying red salvation closing over your bare skin, burying you deeper and deeper. At first the brush’s rough hairs hurt, tore your skin and sent your own red welling up, but by the third coat you could hardly feel a thing. The pain brought to mind her warnings, that she would not be gentle and that this would hurt–that your claustrophobia might make this process unpalpable, that if you broke the cocoon she would not be able to wrap it around you a second time. Hurt filled you with fear. ...

When scientists first started experimenting with genetically programmed radical body plan modifications (which isn’t what they called it—they had a catchy acronym and a billion-dollar PR firm and everything you don’t), the first dozen generations did not go particularly well. They jabbed needles into eggs and grew monsters: pathetic, mewling things with their bones on the outside or no bones at all, with the wrong number of limbs or the wrong number of hearts, things which were little more than bundles of cancer clawing at the womb that held them. ...